Tree Bodies

We’ve traveled from the intangible human and arboreal forms of communication and will now look at the bodies that sustain these functions.

“People see better what looks like them,” writes fiction author Richard Powers. Wohlleben seems to agree. In his chapter “Trees Aging Gracefully,” Wohlleben uses analogy to teach the reader about the bodies of trees and the changes they experience as they grow through life.

“Before I talk about age, I would like to take a detour into the subject of skin. Trees and skin? First let’s approach the subject of skin from the human point of view. Our skin is a barrier that protects our innermost parts from the outer world. It holds in fluids. It stops our insides from falling out, and all the while it releases and absorbs gas and moisture. In addition, it blocks pathogens that would just love to spread through our circulatory system. Aside from that, it is sensitive to contact, which is either pleasant and gives rise to the desire for more, or painful and elicits a defensive response.” First, Wohlleben makes a point to his readers that he is shifting to a human perspective, implying that up until that point they’ve been engulfed in a more scientifically mechanical description of tree functions. Words like “sensitive,” “pleasant,” “desire,” “painful”—plant a seed in the reader’s mind that trees, too, . Wohlleben waters this seed to ensure feel its growth, by asking and answering his own rhetorical question: “And how does this relate to trees? It’s just the same with them. The biggest difference is simply the vocabulary we use. The skin of Beeches, Oaks and Spruce is called bark.” Here, Wohlleben directly refers to trees’ bark as skin. He also capitalizes the tree species names like one would capitalize a person’s nationality—German, African, Indian.

Where I take issue is in the sentence: “It’s just the same with them.” This seems like a brash overgeneralization. Bark and skin function in very do mirrored ways, but bark’s differences should be appreciated in a way that isn’t only reflected in humans. Though a common reader may find ease in this child-like simplification, a reader with a scientific background may be turned off and irritated by it. Every analogy can only go so far, and a lack of justification can lead to a lower scientific competency.

In the pages to follow Wohlleben walks the reader through the physical changes trees undergo as they age, oh so slowly. For, “at about 100, they have just outgrown their youth.” He uncovers human-parallels in how trees’ “skin” darkens and hardens in the sun, and is more likely to crack; how “wrinkles gradually appear…and they steadily deepen as the years progress…the deeper the cracks, the more reluctant the tree is to shed its bark.” How tree skin can get “skin diseases” and carry lifelong scars or have festering wounds. “So it is not only in people that the skin is a mirror to the soul (or state of well-being),” he writes. This metaphor concludes his scientific

explanations of tree skin and sends the reader off with the potential for them to judge a tree’s book by their cover. But further, this analogy gives trees a spiritual animacy—green beings with a soul, that humans can empathize with through their bark.

Wohlleben continues on how the highest branches in trees’ crowns thin with age, just like humans’ hair. This also means the tree begins “shrinking”. As the trees vascular system and roots grow exhausted eventually, pumping water up to the top of the tree. and Trees begin to grow wider shorter with age, “(another parallel to many people of advancing years)” Wohlleben nudges, between parenthesis.

Finally, at the end of the tree’s life, Wohlleben describes the gradual and beautiful death of a tree, a stage of life less comparable to humans. Year by year fungi penetrate through wounds in the old skin, where they begin decomposing the body, “deep into the wood at the heart of the tree.” The tree fights until the very last moment. When the elder falls, its trunk is ready to “serve as a cradle for its own young.”

Wohlleben shifts from this this maternal metaphor to give a hardy German explanation. “Young spruce sprout particularly well in the dead bodies of their parents. This is known as ‘nurse-log reproduction’ in English, and, somewhat gruesomely, as Kadaververjungung , or ‘cadaver rejuvenation,’ in German,” writes Wohlleben. Here we can identify the different cultural values embedded in the languages. Each of these culturally coded terms describe an ecological process through a human lens. This is where Kimmerer’s animacy differs from Wohlleben’s personification. While the Potawatomi language gives non-human living beings sentient acknowledgement, personification assumes a culturally anthropocentric (human-centered) value, overlooking the traits that un are very -human. While this tactic speaks well to the consumptive culture of today, it doesn’t encourage the biocentric values needed for a sustainable future. Personification is the environmental elementary step toward animacy, toward a society that respects other living beings for what they are, not for resembling a human. Animacy allows the tree to be a tree.

The Hidden Life of Trees ’ personified presentation of scientific findings became a New York Times bestseller and has been translated from German to 15 other languages, selling 320,000 copies in its first six months. The book’s teachings have been referenced in the national bestseller, climate-fiction novel, The Overstory by Richard Powers, and in National Geographic articles, including journalist Michelle Z. Donahue’s “Ancient Forest Home of Squatter Communities Is Doomed by Coal.” From fiction to nonfiction, literary to journalistic, Wohlleben’s message has spread through humans’ own communicating networks. The book’s popularity suggests his personification of trees as “kin,” “neighbors” and “forest communities,” is a useful tactic, even though the anthropocentric analogies also go too far at times.

“There is not enough science in Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees to satisfy one’s curiosity, or if there is, it’s hidden under layers of fluff and sappy anthropomorphism,” writes Anita Roy The Hindu Business Line from . When personification is relied on too heavily in non-fiction the science loses its merit. After all, a tree is not a human.

“But we shouldn't be concerned about trees purely for material reasons, we should also care about them because of the little puzzles and wonders they present us with.” —The Hidden Life of Trees